Cap-n-Tax: Team Obama Piles On the Outrages

It’s appreciably more difficult for Washington politicians to amaze Americans who paid any attention at all to what has been transpiring in Washington. And that number is growing. But the Democrats are giving it their best shot.

Read this just out from Politico, explaining that the Senate’s committee process simply must be suspended to jam through Obama’s energy/cap-and-tax Power Grab, because it is so expansive that it would invoke the jurisdiction of six Senate committees. These include the tax-writing Finance Committee, because cap-and-trade and the new gas tax (styled by some cheerleaders who think you’re stupid as a “carbon-linked fee”).

So, again, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is going to write a couple of thousand pages — and try to buy off the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with revenues taken from you — in closed-door, back room deals. The ability to do so is one reason the bill in its House version grew to 1,400 pages, bigger and bigger with each closed-door deal. There are so many ways to design this takeover and the wealth transfers and lost freedoms involved, and to hide and target the hurt.

If that sounds like the health care takeover, it should. It’s the same thing. As the perpetrators admit to Politico. So possibly C-SPAN might ask to be involved. Surely the White House can come up with a better response than last time.

For example, although the popular discussion in Washington is now trending toward the likelihood of a European-style Value Added Tax (VAT), this is being rhetorically cushioned with the explanation that it is the only politically viable or even foreseeable way to raise the revenue that Obama’s Leviathan State requires. That’s untrue.

Team Obama is hiding its cap-and-tax cram-down behind closed doors because, as documents I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act — drafted within days of Obama’s victory in preparation for just such a moment — reveal, the bureaucrats believe they can plunder an equivalent of the entire corporate income tax haul per year from cap-and-trade, designed the way Obama has called for it.

That is $400 billion per year. That’s several percentage points of GDP. That’s the biggest tax increase in American history in constant dollars, by far. All of which I detail in Power Grab.

Meanwhile, as Reid et al. plot to continue the hijacking of democracy, EPA is conducting a video contest soliciting public video entries that support growing the regulatory state, on the odd argument that regulations already touch almost every aspect of your life. Oh. Then surely more is better.

And responding by providing the requested video advocacy is just the sort of helpful grassroots activity that community organizing is all about. And probably just what the “stimulus” bill had in mind when it dedicated millions in wealth transfers to the same groups. As I also detail in Power Grab. You are taking my hard-earned money to pay people to speak out in favor of you taking more of my hard-earned money. I hate to be so Bob Dole but, where’s the outrage?

As you’ll see in Politico, the Democrats’/Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)’s argument distilled is that such an enormous undertaking would overwhelm the poor dears, so Harry Reid and whomever he brings back into the room with him need to hammer the couple of thousand pages out. It’s for everyone’s own good.

I remind you, that’s their defense.

Maybe, instead, these perils are ones that our Founders would have read as indicating that you either a) do this with particular attention to the Constitution’s clear presumption of transparent and accountable policymaking, or b) you don’t do it at all.

So, we see here proof that they really are that radical. And they’re scared that their opportunity to “organize society” is short-lived and is creating a backlash, such that they’d better cram as much down now as they can.

This isn’t news. But this latest Power Grab is. So far the Republicans have raised eyebrows but not their voices. Will they shut down the Senate in protest, or at least to stall this and draw attention to the sleaze being employed to no media opprobrium — all of the proper people know that this is a very fashionable issue, so long as the windmills are placed out there next to the unwashed.

Will you let them get away with it? Or, as I hopefully note at the end of my book, will you have something to tell your kids and grandkids that you did in this war?